Nuptial Eve
by Drucilla
Summary: Lucius Malfoy, on the eve of his wedding night, receives a visit from an old school friend. (clean version)


A/N: It's not finished quite yet, but it stands alone well enough as it is now. Adult version to be posted on AdultFanFic.net shortly.  
  
Lucius shook his white-blonde head in the closest he ever came to despair. Here he was on the eve of his wedding, pressed and dressed already prepared for the ceremony, and the bachelor party hadn't even started yet. He wasn't looking forward to any of it. He knew that it would all end badly.  
  
Oh, he didn't have any sort of gift of prophecy. He wasn't even planning to sabotage his own marriage, not that it needed any sabotaging. Narcissa Black was aptly named, and cared for no one but herself. The match between them had been just as much a breeding program as anything else. Together they would have beautiful, white-blonde wizarding children that would grow up to make the long lineage of both parents proud. Their marriage would never be anything more than coldly civil, but then again it didn't have to be. The intimate acts themselves could be easily performed with the aid of a potion or two. The social functions could be borne with the façade of pleasantry. And through it all there would be nothing solid at the core that could be turned to in times of adversity. Hardened enough to the realities of the world, even Lucius Malfoy had enough of a heart left within him to want that something solid, that spark at the core of the marriage to which he was sentenced for the rest of his life.  
  
But, as he had expected and anticipated since . well, for a long time, such a thing was not to be. It had been beyond the realm of probability since his final year at Hogwarts, when his fate had been sealed with the negotiations between his father and Narcissa's. And he had never been one to indulge himself in whimsical fantasies; he was, after all, a Malfoy. He dealt in harsh truths.  
  
The cold young man stared at his reflection in the glass and tugged on the hem of his jacket with the uneasy air of any bridegroom, eager or less so. He knew the dressmaker had gotten his measurements accurately, he had ensured it. But the coat, indeed the whole suit felt like a snare, like some sort of trap that was dragging him inexorably towards his doom. He stripped it off in a sudden fit of anger, striding over to his wardrobe in silk pants that whispered against his legs. He had to wear something else tonight anyway.  
  
The wardrobe doors were thrown open wide and Lucius stared into its confines, wondering. Hundreds of outfits, thousands of Galleons, and he still didn't have anything to wear. Nothing that seemed appropriate for the occasion anyway, and Lucius did pride himself on always being appropriate to the occasion. What exactly did one wear to one's bachelor party anyway? He didn't have the slightest clue; he'd never been to one of the damn things before. He wouldn't have even attended his own except that it was one of the male social events of the season, and therefore he had to at least put in a brief appearance. Damn society and its rules.  
  
He selected an outfit of ice blue and deep black, knowing full well the effect it had with his Nordic coloring. Traditionally bachelor parties were supposed to contain women of somewhat loose virtue; if he was lucky he might actually enjoy himself somewhat. If he was very lucky. oh, who in the name of Merlin was he kidding. He hadn't enjoyed himself since.  
  
Well, for a very long time.  
  
And on the plus side, it was looser and better fitting than his wedding clothes. Or maybe it was just that they were wedding clothes, and designed to give the impression of constricting the unlucky bridegroom into unconsciousness. He smoothed the fabric over his chest, gave his reflection in the mirror a smirk of satisfaction, and headed down to make the final preparations for his evening.  
  
"Dobby, I'm off to my." he was finally able to say the words without sneering too openly. "Bachelor party. Notify anyone who calls that I will not be available for several days, and if they really want to talk they can come to he wedding."  
  
The house elf dogged his heels as he collected his things, babbling something inane and inconsequential. He paid the creature no attention.  
  
"If either my father or my esteemed mother should enquire I have gone to the Lestranges', as per my invitation, and they can contact me there if there is a dire emergency. Other than that I do not wish to be disturbed, you will take any messages."  
  
The damn creature was becoming most insistent. He tugged at Lucius's sleeve, and the young man whirled in a flurry of blonde hair and temper, glaring at the house elf who was still muttering desperately, "Master! Master?"  
  
"What is it, Dobby?"  
  
He looked up.  
  
"Master has a visitor."  
  
He couldn't breathe. He was dying, drowning all over again as he nearly had when he was six. His head had suddenly become lighter than air, floating amidst the chandeliers in the ceiling. He had fainted, and was staring at a hallucination.  
  
She was standing there, radiant as the dawn and ominous as the dusk, staring at him. Her dark hair was swept into a mass of curls that framed her pale face beautifully, her eyes colored with just the right tones of dark kohl and gem-colored shadow. She stared at him with those dark, liquid eyes, watching his every moved. Her lips stood out in stark contrast to her skin, deep blood red as though she had been indulging in vampire tastes before she arrived to unexpectedly at his door. Her lips moved in the shapes of his name, although he couldn't detect any sound or sign that she had spoken.  
  
"Eurydice." he breathed. The mere act of speaking her name brought a flush to his cheeks. Hers remained pale, where once the sound of his voice had been enough to make her blush and look away for an instant. But that, too, had been a long time ago.  
  
"Lucius." She said his name aloud this time, and her voice made him shiver as it always had.  
  
"What are you doing here?" He kept his voice neutral, careful not to imply any one thing or the other by his posture or his tone. He hadn't seen her in three years.  
  
"Waiting for you."  
  
Lucius sighed. She had always had a knack for being direct and yet being downright cryptic at the same time. He thought it rather had something to do with the fact that she never outright lied but she made an art form of lying by omission. When she didn't want to talk one had to practically drag the answers out of her. "Why?"  
  
She opened her eyes wide, disingenuous. She looked like a film noir heroine, hips cocked to one side and arms folded over her chest. A tiny smirk lifted the corners of her lips. "Can't you think of a reason?"  
  
Oh, Merlin's beard, not this game again. He was too tired and too upset to play this game with her. "Several, actually. Which is the right reason?"  
  
Eurydice's eyes narrowed, picking up on his waspish tone and interpreting it correctly. "To see you, on the eve of your wedding day. The only reason I needed."  
  
That sounded ominous. Apart from the sheer fact that she had assiduously avoided him since they had graduated from Hogwarts, the eve of his wedding day was a particularly inauspicious time for her to be visiting. It was a particularly inauspicious time for anyone to be visiting, especially Eurydice.  
  
"I see." He sighed, suddenly too tired to deal with it and not even looking forward to attending the damn party.  
  
She cocked one delicate eyebrow at him, patient as always.  
  
"What do you want, Eurydice?" he asked finally, passing his hand over his eyes in a gesture of consummate weariness. "I don't have the time or the energy to spare for this."  
  
"Just to talk." She smiled. Her smiles had always been poison in his veins. "We haven't had a good talk in. how long has it been, lamb? Three, four years?"  
  
"Four years." Since their sixth year at Hogwarts. She had been a most precocious student; heat flushed up through his collar at the memory. "Three since we last saw each other."  
  
"Ah yes." As if she hadn't known how long it had been. As though she hadn't been reckoning it up to the very day and hour how long it had been since they had last exchanged friendly or unfriendly words. "And what have you been doing with yourself in all that time?"  
  
If he hadn't known better he would have thought her tone was actually affectionate. Affection made him cross, especially from old school friends. "You know exactly what I've been doing." He turned away, anything to get away from her.  
  
"No, wait." She hurried after him, tiny feet click-clacking on the floor in her sharp heeled boots. All. at least most of the pretense was gone from her voice, and the touch on his arm was light and unintrusive. He turned around and looked at her. Her posture had relaxed to an attitude of calm and easy friendship, not the careful poise she kept for those outside her social circle. "Lucius, I'm sorry. I really did just want to see you one last time before you were given off to that woman. Forgive me?"  
  
He sighed heavily. With that expression on her face and that tone in her voice he couldn't resist her, and she knew it. He had never been able to resist her at her most winsome, which had proved to be his undoing in his sixth year at Hogwarts. "Of course," he said, not ungraciously (a Malfoy was never ungracious) as he reached out to take her hands. Then he frowned. "You're ice cold?"  
  
She nodded, hunching in on herself as though she still felt she needed to brace herself against a cold wind. "It's cold up in the mountains of Siberia."  
  
"Siberia?" He grabbed her by the hands and led her into the expansive parlor, all unease of earlier forgotten. "What in the name of the Blood were you doing in Siberia?"  
  
"Tracking down insurgents. it doesn't matter."  
  
Lucius settled her on the couch closest to the fire, wrapped her in a blanket and put a simple heat-containing charm on it. The house-elf brought her something warm to drink, and he waited while she wrapped her hands around the mug and soaked up a little of the warmth. Insurgents in Siberia. Of all the damnfool things.  
  
Although she had been a consummate Slytherin, he and everyone else in her year had been surprised when she had wound up applying for an Auror position with the Ministry of Magic. It seemed the ultimate irony that while most of her friends would go on to become Death Eaters, servants of the Dark Lord, while she went about blithely hunting them down. For a Slytherin she had a peculiar sense of honor, even if she was as much an advocate of pure blood as any of them. It had been a private point of contention between her and Lucius for years. He hadn't understood her then and he didn't understand her now.  
  
"Tracking down insurgents?"  
  
She nodded, sipped her hot coffee that he had had liberally laced with cognac and sighed. "Some wit-wandering idiot set a bomb in one of the towns up there. The villagers couldn't understand why half of their victims seemed to explode at the first touch of heat. Complex spellwork, have to admire their." she wrinkled her nose delicately against a sneeze. "Excuse me. their tenacity."  
  
He didn't really see what all the fuss was about over some Muggles in a remote village, and said so. She just gave him that look that said he didn't understand, that look that somehow reduced him to a puzzled, slightly dim student again. He flushed, angry.  
  
"You've never understood why I do what I do, Lucius. You've never understood the checks and balances of power." Eurydice smiled, taking some but not all of the sting out of her next words. "It's always been one of your strongest failings."  
  
"What is there to understand?" he retorted, nettled. "The ability to change one's life, and the lives of one's allies, lies in the hands of those with power. Those who don't have it are doomed to be mediocre and poor for the rest of their lives." It was an utter simplification, and they both knew it. But as erudite as he was, he had never had the skill with words, or even tones and gestures, that she had.  
  
"If you say so," she murmured, and the topic was changed. It left Lucius with the distinct feeling that he had lost out on the argument without ever actually going into the ring. Damn infuriating woman.  
  
"How is the Auror business going, then. Productive?" He couldn't keep the bitter sneer from his voice. She should have been working for them, she should have been there to receive the Mark right alongside him.  
  
"Fairly." She ignored all hints of rancor in his voice. "I'm still in training, you know, working alongside a senior Auror on staff. It's eventful at any rate, never a dull moment."  
  
They were silent for a little bit. Then, finally, it burst out of him. "You should have come with me, Eurydice. You should have been the first among us. With your skills and your knowledge you would have been an excellent Death Eater. You could have had power and influence that rivaled the Dark Lord."  
  
"I never wanted that, Lucius. Well, no, I never denied that I wanted power, knowledge. But not at the price of honor. The aim of your Death Eaters may be admirable but the cost is higher than I am willing to pay. You know that perfectly well." She sighed, shaking her head and sending her dark curls bobbing slightly at her shoulders, her hair falling over her face and obscuring it. "There is nothing to the victory if it is achieved by destroying everything you set out to rule. You will be a king of a hollow land, Lucius, if you keep this up."  
  
"Better to reign over a blasted land."  
  
". than to be left along the wayside of progress, I know."  
  
It was an old argument between them, and it didn't go anywhere new tonight. Rather than upset things further he let the subject die again and stared into the fire, brooding. At least it was more pleasant than it would have been at that so-called bachelor party, or it probably was anyway. Sitting in his own home, in front of his own fire, next to someone for whom he had never felt any real need to put on a façade. That was not to say that he was always easy in her presence, but at least he could be plain and blunt with her. There were no masks between them, no need to keep up a brave front so that she wouldn't tear him up the second his back was turned. It was one of the few good effects of her stubborn sense of honor. If she was going to come after you it was because she felt you'd earned it, or she'd warned you. Either way, you knew in advance.  
  
"It's not too late." he offered more out of habit than anything else. "You could come with me. The war hasn't begun in earnest, you could offer your skills and services, your knowledge. There would always be a place for you."  
  
Eurydice smiled and patted his hand, oddly enough without being patronizing. "I know, dear one. But it's not the place for me right now. I have to do what I have to do, and there's no point in trying to change my mind about it. You know that."  
  
Lucius sighed. It had been worth a try, and she might very well have been enough to turn the Death Eaters into an unstoppable force. He stared down at the couch, at her slim and tapered fingers resting gently over his. Her hands were smooth and white as silk, not what he had expected in an Auror. He looked back up into her eyes, and caught her staring at him.  
  
"What?"  
  
There was that smile again. Only this time there was shyness in with the secret humor. "Nothing." She turned her head to the side, keeping an eye on him through her lashes but otherwise not making any more contact than necessary. Except that her hand still lingered on his. He reached over and stroked the back of her hand with a fingertip, thinking.  
  
The back of her hand. her skin was so soft. Softer than it should have been for an Auror stationed in Siberia. Nothing about her added up, which was unusual for a woman who found enough ways to lie without being outright about it. He narrowed his eyes at her, reached out and took her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him.  
  
"All right, Eurydice. Where have you really been?"  
  
She blinked at him, wide eyes, disingenuous and deepest blue. Darker color in her eyes meant she was hiding something, always. "In Siberia, I told you."  
  
"But that's not all of it, is it?" She tried to pull her hand away and he clasped it firmly. Her other hand came up to his wrist, but less in an attempt to pull away and more in a placating gesture. It really was a pity that he wasn't in a mood to be placated. "Tell me the whole story, Eurydice. All of it."  
  
She stared into his eyes, and in that split second he realized that whatever hidden magics she had to captivate people with a glance had somehow rubbed off on him. She couldn't look away, not now. His fingers tightened over hers, startling a gasp from her.  
  
"The truth, Eurydice."  
  
Her lips parted, her mouth opened. Words came out, and at first he was so elated by the discovery of his new talent that he didn't pay attention to what she was saying. "I was in Siberia training for an Auror. but it was almost entirely paperwork. Menial tasks, things that kept me safely inside the offices there and out of the hair of the real workers. I was so bored that I began poking around in the libraries."  
  
As usual. It was one of the more interesting facets of her quick and agile mind; she had found the company of the usual sort of Slytherins to be boring, and instead spent a great deal of time in the libraries. He wasn't sure if any of their other classmates had realized that it was the time spent on books that had made her a cut above the rest, more so than her natural talent with spells. She read faster than most of them could think, and retained a great deal of the information she sped through.  
  
"And.?"  
  
She smirked. Whatever was next was going to be something good, perhaps something powerful, perhaps even something he could use. "And nothing. There was nothing terribly worthwhile, different, or of earth-shattering importance in the libraries in Siberia. So you see, Lucius, you are breaking my fingers for nothing. I didn't tell you simply because I didn't think you wanted to be bored with the details."  
  
A snarled twisted his normally handsome lip, and he turned her loose with a shove. Damn the woman, she was infuriating even in her uselessness when she should have been the most valuable thing he could have had. She had practically dared him to tease the information out of her, and all it turned out to be was a list of the contents of the library in Siberia. Of all places.  
  
He looked back at her. She sat curled with her legs underneath her, exactly where she had fallen. Her elbow must have hit the edge of the couch, already turning a shade of purple that looked shocking against her white skin. It almost seemed like an insult that she should be so marred.  
  
"You should not have lied to me," he said then, more out of spite than anything else, and because he knew she would flush and grow angry.  
  
"I never lied." Her voice was angry, the heated red creeping up her cheeks.  
  
"You shouldn't," he cut her off, grabbing her by the wrists and pulling her roughly to her feet. "have lied, Eurydice."  
  
His fingers pressed sharply on the insides of her wrists, hard enough to leave more bruises. Her mouth, lips so deep and red, were just beneath his. Her breath was sweet, as though she had been eating strawberries before she'd Apparated into his home. For one second he thought back to the bachelor party that he was supposed to be attending, and all the traditional events contained therein. Perhaps one of the traditions. that whole marital infidelity thing. could be maintained.  
  
"Lucius." she whispered, and her voice was almost afraid except for that little catch in the back of her throat. He hadn't heard that tone of voice from her in so long. "Lucius, please."  
  
He crushed her mouth with his, pulling her as tightly to him as he could manage. God, it had been so very long since they had done this, how could he have forgotten? Her body was so soft, pliant and willing, even as she made the little moans and whimpers of terror half-feigned. There was always that bit of spice to it, the kick that came from inspiring submission and fear in her, and the somehow reassuring knowledge of her absolute trust in him. He didn't pretend to understand the alchemy of their relationship, and he didn't think she understood it either. And in the end, it wasn't what was important anyway.  
  
He had everything that was important, right now. The press of their bodies, the slowly disappearing fabric that separated skin from skin, and the soft carpet onto which he eased them both. 


End file.
